Dissent, Notoriety, hate mail, the works

India today seems to have become a society deeply irritated and angry with corruption and the current system. And suddenly, comes Anna, a man with all the solutions, the new Gandhi, and I only feel blown away by the enormity of it all. Is this really the second great freedom struggle and am I just a fat cat lazy to do anything for anyone else, and therefore looking for excuses to do so? Or is there an argument against the movement. Honestly, I don't know , and I would be the first person to say that it is a very difficult thing to know, and every person has to look only to themselves for answers.

I think the fundamental question really is corruption and it should stay that way. There has been a lot of hullabaloo about a lot of allied issues like arrests and so on. I am really surprised that the theme coming out of a lot of the pro-Anna speeches is outrage, because outrage implies these guys didn't expect Anna to get arrested. That is exactly what they should have expected, because this is striking at the very heart of why a politician does what he does. Because if the bill is passed they will have to become Lokpals to continue their business, and studying for and passing exams is a bit tedious when you are an uneducated 50 year old.

Yes, the fundamental question, corruption. Will the Jan Lokpal bill really solve the problem. At first glance it seems exceedingly effective. But on a boring bus journey I was struck by a thought, a Lokpal at the local RTO reminded me of the external examiner we used to get at the 12th standard lab exams. They were teachers, usually from a nearby school. They knew their counterparts in my school, they were mindful of the fact that the shoe might be in the other foot the next time they met. They even tutored some of us after school. They are going to be bureaucrats. They will probably hail from somewhere nearby and will have their lunch with their corrupt colleagues. You can't expect them to rat their colleagues out. Plus now they will be paid for this camaraderie. Probably more than the government gives them. So this might just lead to a bribe inflation of sorts. They could also be of the second kind, the big daddy gestapo-officer kind of guy. The guy whom every one fears who has the bully on the block and everything has to pass through him. Same result i suppose. Forgive me, I am not very aware of how exactly they propose these guys will be selected, but i am at pains to understand how the same government servant can suddenly be persuaded to not only stop bribe-taking, but also report his fellow bribe-takers.

When I think of all this I can point my fingers one way, incentives. It is simply easier to pay a bribe in most cases of bribery. That is how a lot of these procedures are, there is a lot of red tape and consequently the wheels of the organization need a little oiling. If I could make more money at the same risk levels, then I take the choice that makes me more money, every time. Imagine the traffic police getting penalized for every hold up. Consequently, they should also be paid for efficient functioning. I somehow believe correcting the incentive structure in government bodies will go a long way to solving the problem of corruption. And I am willing to go on a limb and say it will work better than the lokpal.

In the end I am wrong and Anna is right anyway. What a waste of time.

P.S :

Sometime back, the demographic that would have cringed on hearing "Anna is right" (especially in Tamil Nadu) is the one that seems to be chanting it now.

Considering the number of actual posts Anna Hazare holds, he seems to have more power and less accountability than a lot of "shadier" people. (should i hashtag sacrilege??)

An edifice for THE EDIFICE

The beauty of sport is the oxy-moronic abundance of Black Swan events. Events of otherwise low probability which must be factored into human thinking later, like the invention of the wheel.

There is a first-time occurring almost year-in year-out. Take Sachin Tendulkar's 200 in a one-day international, or Lance Armstrong's recovery from cancer.

Black swan events can change a whole paradigm of thought and cause whole populations to shift, it can even drive a country to mass suicide as Hitler did to Germany. The World War, incidentally, also stopped Arsenal from stamping their authority on English football similar to the legendary Liverpool side. This brings me to the black swan I am going to write about, Arsenal vs. Barcelona 16th February 2011. A night that i will never forget, it kindled my fond hope that 5 years down the line, i will watch Jack Wilshere lead Arsenal to one more unforgettable season. Just as every season is unforgettable. For me even a thankless season like the 2009-10 one will be memorable because it signifies the emergence of Alexandre song as one of the premier holding midfield players in the English League. This season will remain in my mind, irrespective of the ending, as the rise of Jack Wilshere.

And what better night to remember this than a day on which he stood toe to toe against arguably the best central midfielder in the world, and more than held his own. It was like watching one of those 10 yr old chess players fight a memorable battle against a grandmaster. And boy was I thrilled, the 10 year old won more than his fair share of fifty-fifties, distributed the ball like a communist's farmland, hardly miss-passed, was bloody brilliant. I can only hope that he is also an on-field inspiration, for in him we could have our next great leader of men.

And Robin Van Persie, I can never forget the commentator saying that the arsenal tune this season is Rocking robin. A fully fit RVP season will definitely bring trophies. Even his half-fit season now seems to be looking bright.

I have nothing to add to the words of my much-more well-informed football fans other than one more primal shout of "Yessssss" at the site of an irrepressible Russian calmly stroking the ball into far corner.

Thank You,

Arsene Wenger, Manager, Arsenal F.C

Liam Brady, Director of Youth Development, Arsenal F.C

Jack Wilshere, the "cure" to my Atheism

madness??? THIS....IS...INDIA

This is from a person who has written his last few blog entries with nothing like fanfare surrounding them. I have never wanted my blog to be a 'hit'in the conventional sense of the term, but this is one article that i would like to see a lot of comments on. Because that is why i am doing this, this is plain old publicity and an exaggerated sense of importance in a world where little that i do actually makes a difference in people. And of course this is my anger boiling out into an unseen corner of the world wide web. And now, however boring that was, please read on.

When you live in India you get used to many forms of looting, you know you need to pay a bribe to get a driving license, that when smiling Gandhi is on your side, you may be Osama Bin Laden for all the system cares. You know that India runs on money of the black variety. And we still try to hold on to the few things we hold dear in our country, from the idlis and the chappathis to taking solace from the fact that even if a politician has looted enough for him to live in peace with a (very) fixed deposit in a not-so-neutral country called Switzerland, which pays 3% according to Jeffery Archer, he can expect to get a one hour of restlessness and public humiliation at the hands of Karan Thapar.

As an aside, here are some nice numbers to crunch, as they crunch our tax away.Assuming he siphoned of 1% of the government loss, and at 1% interest P.A, his annual income is 1.76 crores, and i hardly need say tax free. Contributing a few points to the second decimal in that figure will be his salary as a Member of parliament. And we were thinking he'd fret about an hour with Karan Thapar.

And so we are all not surprised by this sort of looting, now a different strain of looting has come to surface, and this has managed to shock me, because it not only looted, it attempted to rob from the grave of truth. And truth is something i thought was important to the vast majority of India. It died and was buried the day we started worshiping our icons in the film world, and giving them the same power over our destinies in the real world. It's corpse turned the day we started worshiping a lady who almost turned our country into a dictatorship, not to mention her family. And today they rob its grave, they deprive it of the dignity of being thought of as correct by the average person. They refuse to show a woman who has won a lot of awards for journalism lobbying to loot us. They refuse to show the way the only people who had the public reach to challenge our flawed system now join the bandwagon dancing at truth's death procession.

But here's why i shouldn't be surprised. When you do something for 60 years, with a remarkable cooperation and an immense knowledge sharing capability, your product becomes good, as good as peter england shirts or Godrej cupboards. And you become immensely efficient at what you are doing. This is corruption in India, since 1947. After a point of time, it is the small chinks in the armour that you have to repair, and that is what they are doing now. As for the members of the media, they realized they weren't making great progress anyway, so why not make a quick buck while suffering no possible damage to your image and still being the "bastion of truth". As i had once said, people will always do what is good for them, physically, mentally and monetarily.

Now ladies and gentlemen, you are faced with a choice, you can either join the bandwagon by doing nothing, and therefore piss on truth's empty grave. Or try and climb the mountain with small steps. To elaborate, if you feel you are comfortable enough today, join them, there is nothing wrong in free, informed choice. On the other hand, if you feel that you would benefit from a future absence of looters, mentally, physically or monetarily. Let us climb the mountain of improbability facing us by taking small steps. What you find below represents the choice, take the choice, and you feel you have done the right thing, direct a few possibly interested people to this corner of the world wide web. For it is on the web that the whispers which will start this revolution will begin.

Barkha dutt Nira radia tapes Russel Peters on Indians

To march on....

It is a challenge I have taken upon myself to look at my life and the circumstances objectively and as dispassionately as possible. This seemed a reasonable goal for a person who doesn't like to blame circumstance for any of his failures. There is, of course, the flip side that i refuse to attribute any of my successes to circumstance as well. However, I seem to be facing many challenges in the above task recently. For things are rarely as easy as they seem. Now it seems to me that I had created this cushioned air-bag of denial of things that did not affect me. I was never in denial of their existance, just their ability to affect my life in any way. Recently that airbag was ripped apart into insignificance.

It is perhaps a collective ability to renounce our decision making that distinguishes us as a nation. And I shall carry on blaspheming until someone stops. The first knife that plunged into the airbag was a splinter that flew from the Ayodhya verdict. I'd now like you to imagine a guy working in a city 3 hrs away from his grandparents' house. This guy decides to surprise his family by arriving without warning one Thursday night. He books bus tickets a day in advance, books a cab a day in advance, and eagerly awaits the look on his grandparents' faces come Thursday night. The cruel and very-much-expected twist is that the bus is cancelled, the guy catches another bus, and reaches home at an unearthly hour. He is extremely out-of-sorts throughout the journey home, and decides to write about it.

As I write about it, a second knife, or rather bullet, fired from the hand of an andro-humanoid named Chitti ( What a name ) , plunges into the airbag. And there emerged a second, more drastic example of our ability to suspend our reason at the twist of a dark glass and a word, a word which would have been ridiculed into infamy had it come from any other mouth, DOT. It amazes me that the mere name of a protagonist should instantly banish the grey cells from our system. The director is brazen enough to say that the year is 2010. Not even resorting to the cheap excuse that the movie is set in the future. I agree that the man possesses an uncommon charisma and ability to make ordinary things seem extraordinary. This charisma is, however wasted when he is made to seem innately larger-than-life instead of an ordinary man with the attitude of a champion. The scene in which he picks out the impostor from a flock of robots was brilliant, simply because it made no use of the fact that the antagonist was a robot and could make himself into a giant cannon if he wanted to. I frankly did not see much in the movie other than the obvious flaunting of the director's budget and an excuse, a wafer-thin one, to ingest all the stunts that we would have seen anyway. We accept all this by saying that this is all we can expect from a small industry like ours. To those people i would like to point out that we have come up with brilliant art and have a creative brain second to none.

After all this I march on, sad that i will not find a person to ingest my blasphemy and vomit out the taboos that force us to dismantle our mental weapons whenever the conditions demand it. And i march on in the hope that since there is a mountain in sight, a valley must follow, and that I can think, think about the valley and how it could be better. That I can think and rest in those thoughts.

As a parting thought I'd like to say this, a friend once told me that not everything is made for me to think about it. To him I now reply, when you can think about everything, Why not?

A return to maturity

After quite a long sabbatical, it seemed appropriate to post this at a time when i am going through an existential crisis of sorts. The question is, for a person to whom atheism came so quickly, why is patriotism so hard to let go of?

The origins of religion and patriotism seem to me to be similar, as can be said of any group practice. It is just a question of need. I could let go of the concept of god in a heartbeat when it seemed unnecessary to me, but the concept of nation and national pride seems, surprisingly, to take longer to let go of. Here too we find two sides to the coin or, shall we say, to the border. On one side we have a nation of people stooping low enough to accept abnormally low salaries to do the work of other nations' firms. why? because we do not need the same amount of money to live comfortably. Why? because we have lower standards. As Lalit Bhanot very funnily put across, "Western countries have different standards of hygiene." different meaning higher. On the other side, we have a country that is so proud of its ethnicity and exotic image that it's people are willing to be whipped into submission rather than watch the chaotic, but free, demise of their nation. That nation was able to stun the world with an event that oozed efficiency and intent to amaze. And then there is India.

Many in the west believe us to be a nation of snake-charmers. Now we seem to have gone to great lengths to show them that we are worse than they believe. Despite all this, I still can't let go of my sense of patriotism however hard i try. Whenever I try to laugh at what a foolish people we are, i think of how much better we can be. Whenever I laugh at the poor state of affairs, the laughter gives painful birth to a sadness. A sadness that doesn't lend itself to temporary solutions.

Maybe a return to childish innocence is what is required. Or maybe that is what this is. I gladly laugh at a doctored video showing how foolish Americans are, without giving a thought to improving their lot. Had someone done the same to India, I would have been seething behind the smiles. It would be great to experience that moment when I could let go of all this and be a ctizen of the world.

I am still hoping this is that moment, India is dead, We must save India.

The not so sacred games

I seem to have lived life with the wrong ideas till now, until Mr. Salman Khursheed came along. There was this beautiful line he gave when questioned about that-which-must -not-be-discussed. He says "we have found out some mistakes and are rectifying them, that's what supervising teams are for anyway." This line would have been of great use to Mr. Ramalinga Raju had he thought of it then, just replace supervising teams with the fraud squad. Post-Kalmadi, I am very clear on how to live life, the mantra is not to have morals, it is to be open enough in your misdeeds to be deemed incorrigible. The world doesn't look so cruel when you look at it through these glasses.

The mess that we find on our hands seems to beg the question, how did we win the bid in the first place? The only sight I can remember is one of Aishwarya Rai, Rani mukherjee, and co. Dancing away to glory at the Melbourne closing ceremony. They were supposedly giving a taste of what was to come in Delhi. A true taste would have been to hire one of our Chennai water tankers and have them spray muddy water on the audience in a surrealist demonstration of India's bureaucratic inefficiency. That probably started the trend of hiring dancers to grace every ceremony, I also suppose our film stars took this as a sign from the higher-ups that they must take their show abroad. Now music launches are going international, Kuallywood anyone?? Back to the games, a friend of mine recently visited the commonwealth games "stadia" and said there was no chance they would be completed in time. Maybe that is Mr. Kalmadi's master plan, maybe he is planning to show the world its blunder in choosing a city to host an international event and thinking its pride will ensure the smooth organization of the events. While writing this, I have a vivid image of Mr. Kalmadi standing on top of one of the stadia and shouting "everything drowns", bearing an eerie similarity to the joker.

Having conveyed my thoughts on the organizing of the games, I'm going to try and give three possible scenarios that could pan out come October 3^rd :

1. Shame, no doom
   

   An independent committee steps in, Kalmadi is fired and exiled to Rio (the world is never cruel to him). The games are restored to some semblance of order. By order I mean the swimmers need not wade and the sprinters need not swim.
   

2. In Bollywood we trust
   

   We witness the return of our heroes as the opening ceremony, by dint of extreme planning, is made to last the entire 12 days, in the end the baton is passed on to Glasgow, all the gold, silver and bronze medals are melted deposited in a certain Swiss bank account.
   

3. Doomsday
   

   My nightmare comes true, to top it all, Kalmadi paints his face in the colors of the Indian flag, and wears a purple Sherwani. I become an oracle and adopt Mr. K's business model, my chair costs Rs. 70 lakh you know.
   

   
    

By the way, writing satirical posts is extremely relaxing, try it out.

An appeal to reason

This post starts with a pledge. From this day onwards I pledge never to sign any important documents or start any important activities at times other than those considered inauspicious. I pledge to have someone inquire about my destination whenever I go out. I shall eat heartily at the peak of every solar and lunar eclipse. I shall step into every house with my left leg. I am even considering buying a black cat to let loose every time I leave my house. I suppose you realize where this is heading. If I have a say in naming anyone, it will be the worst possible numerological name.

Well, time for some introductions, I am Harshavardan (not Harshavardhan), named according to the principles of numerology, I live in a house which stands, not due to the laws of physics, but due to the blessings of the demon whose picture hangs at the entrance, supposedly to ward off other demons. Demonic pacts apart, every brick in my house screams of strict adherence to Vaastu, which, for the uninitiated, is the Indian version of Feng Shui. This has resulted in an outdoor staircase which leads everyone to think that my house is an apartment with another family living on the first floor, hence we receive double copies of every pamphlet and menu card that is circulated free to households. Another side effect is that everyone from the carpenter to the electrician dutifully reports upstairs when the problem is downstairs and vice versa. Once you enter my house, you will be greeted by a framed picture of a donkey, which apparently thwarts the evil eye. The concept of evil eye is one unique to Tamil culture. According to this theory, we are all supposed to possess an evil eye, which we place upon objects we are jealous of. The logic is that after seeing a donkey, you will not be jealous of the house. And there the logic ends. Another beautiful theory is that three people should not start a journey, this results in me having to walk to the end of the road every time I leave anywhere with my parents.

There are a set of people who tell me that superstitions are superstitions only because we don't know the reasoning behind them. For example, we should not sleep facing south, this has been explained as an effort not to intersect the earth's magnetic field lines, hence avoiding a very small induced current that flows through our body, disturbing our sleep. This however doesn't explain why we are allowed to sleep facing north. We are not allowed to eat during eclipses as the absence of the sun or the moon results in an unhealthy atmosphere for eating. I tried to find any scientific justification for this on the net, the closest one stated that as there used to be very little artificial lighting in olden days, they wouldn't eat during eclipses in order to avoid sharing their meal with lizards, cockroaches etc.. In the age of artificial lighting that is in some ways more powerful than natural lighting, to follow such rules seems foolish to me. It will serve us well to remember that these are the superstitions that I've tried finding justification for, the others don't even qualify for that privilege.

On a more simplistic basis, it seems improper that there are a hundred rules as to when not to do something, or how not to do something when there is no time in which you must work. Being educated, intelligent people it is amazing the way we subconsciously imbibe these rituals from our parents. So now, I am consciously debunking this. For I am going out now and am asking my brother to ask where I am going.

On a totally different note, two of my friends have recently started blogs, Balakrishnan (http://whyshouldinamemyblog.blogspot.com) and Ashwin (http://impru.blogspot.com). Best of luck to them, hope they keep posting.